An Epic Ride:
The Life of Dan Terry
George, Pat, and two-year old James Daniel moved from Kansas to Bombay India in 1948. George as a Certified Public Accountant started to work first in Bombay then around South and Central India, setting up financial accounting for the Methodist mission groups. India was then only a few years old as an independent nation, a land alive with optimism, where the Terry character immediately felt at home.
Schools, hospitals, orphanages, church programs, and a wide variety of programs were being extended across the young nation—each requiring a good bookkeeping system. George developed simplified double entry bookkeeping such that it could be taught to an untrained financial manager in a couple of days—then George returned to each site to make sure protocols were being properly followed. During this period George started taking along wife Pat and son Dan. The historical pattern of Dan's life was cast: this was a boy for rambling.
Then daughter Ruth joined the traveling family. In his reach-over-the-horizon thinking, George decided the efficient way to get to the scattered sites of India was by airplane. After learning to fly in an open cockpit Tiger Moth, the traveling family purchased a military-surplus Saab airplane. Young Dan became chief mechanic assistant, originating what was to become his life-long passion for "torquing bolts” and taking along on each trip a splendid inventory of "needed spare parts.”
As Dan started his school years at Woodstock, although there was always waiting academic work (establishing his life pattern with paperwork––to make sure it stayed waiting). Dan's curiosity for design features of buildings he walked past on the way to school required he crawl out on that roof, sharpened the blades of mechanical items such as pencil sharpeners on the teacher's desk during recess, riding a bicycle from the top of Landour Hill to the bottom. Late in his Woodstock career he rode his motorcycle (with Gabriel Campbell riding a motorscooter) all the way to Kathmandu. The catalogue of exploits about Dan Terry was starting to assemble—each venture successfully concluded but requiring a "knothole passage” along its way—the legacy was forming that set Dan apart from mere mortal student adventures. And, all who know him would be quick to remember, accompanying him on these trips came the essential mandated a spare part of a jar of peanut butter and usually also two cans of "condensee.”
On the way from India to college (at Baker University) Dan was introduced to the love of Afghanistan. To make the trip, the family purchased (and somehow got to India and through customs) a brand new Volkswagen. Eight people rode that VW to Europe—to fit eight into a VW, three rode on the roof laying down inside a special box. After a year in college, Dan took the short route from Kansas to Wyoming through New York City, and his 1952 Chevrolet blew out an engine—but he and Dan'l Taylor pulled another engine out of a junk car along the highway rumbling into the Tetons. Two summers later the two of them drove a VW bus from Europe to India blowing out another engine in the Baluchistan desert, rebuilding that in Herat, blowing out the engine again in Kabul and rebuilding, then burning out the crankshaft bearing in Masar-i-Sharif—after being chased out of Kabul by the Royal Palace Police, finally making it back to Europe. Two summers later, a more experienced, creatively financed Dan Terry came back through Afghanistan, this time taking the route in across the Soviet Union and driving a new VW bus with a Porsche engine.
A deep believer in peace with the Vietnam War at full bore, Dan returned to Afghanistan following a brief stint in Bangladesh. In Afghanistan, he met Seija, who was perhaps not quite sure what to make of the suitor, a man with such deep love of the country, peacemaking, justice, and now for a woman who clearly also shared these feelings. The wide open hills of the highlands of Afghanistan became the grounding place for their love, especially for the isolated communities of Afghanistan in Lal-Sarjungal with the disenfranchised Hazara people. Stories are legion from those years as Dan extricated numerous vehicles from snowdrifts in order to get over the passes and repair broken axles—and share a meal with Seija. And accompanying those meals was always the jar of peanut butter and the can of condensee (and as Dan memorably found when trying to caramalize condensee, left on the wood stove it explodes just as nicely as a hand grenade).
Following two years working at the Woodlands Institute in West Virginia (starting with a quick side-trip to Finland to finally marry Seija) the couple moved to West Virginia University where Dan completed his Masters degree. The family became three with the birth of daughter Hilja. But Afghanistan called, and the family with toddling Hilja headed back into service. They arrived in Afghanistan just months before the Soviet invasion, and unlike most other international workers, the Terry family did not leave. They hunkered down to continue the service for which they had gone out.
Two mind-boggling decades of challenges followed in which while most people in the world viewed Afghanistan as a land of war and devastation, the Dan Terry perspective saw opportunity. People were trying to improve their lives, and Dan and Seija (now with two daughters after the arrival of Anneli) served in nursing, prosthetics, and transport delivering assistance to valleys most aid agencies had never heard of. As Afghan pressure on the Soviet occupiers grew and almost all foreign workers left Afghanistan, the Terrys stayed.
The war then got hot. Among the more bizarre stores was that of a Soviet pilot ejecting from his jet whose parachute did not open, leaving him plastered into the compound wall adjoining the Terry house. When the Soviets finally withdrew, again the Terry family stayed. The Afghan Civil War had begun. One of the world's most chaotic wars was underway, with daily shifts of loyalties among armies and totally random acts of massive violence against civilians. There were now five in the family with addition of a third daughter, Saara. In these years Kabul was hardly the place to be, nor were the hidden valleys of Afghanistan's heartland, so the family moved north to Mazar-i-Sharif. At times, the family would come back to their home and find it emptied of many of their treasured possessions, but still they stayed because of their witness of caring and solidarity.
Not only did the health-based work the Terrys supported testify to their values, but perhaps most dramatically was the daily-life-experience of raising a family of three lovely daughters. This was a family sharing the experience of living. Their outlook did not turn life in Afghanistan into a heroic act, but rather that of plain living with the people.
This sharing of life with the people spoke of the family's special perspective. The Terry family was there, showing that they were also people, struggling like their neighbors to assemble a daily life with steps toward peace. It was a family statement of trust in the Afghan people—vividly shown by the trust of their daughters as they would travel alone, just the teenage girls using public transport, from Afghanistan across Pakistan and north India to Woodstock School in the Himalayas. The world might view Afghanistan as a land of hostility, but the Terrys stepped beyond such viewpoints and in their actions showed this was also a land where trust was still alive.
Following the chaos of civil war came the period of Taliban control. Through that too the Terrys stayed, holding family, reaching out to the people. There is the memorable moment of Dan's bicycle seat being shot out from under his crotch in the Kabul bazaar (yes, he still carried shrapnel from that until his recent death).
More profound in the lives of people, were the years of Dan's leadership through devastating droughts that prevented wheat crops from growing, droughts then followed by crippling winters of starvation. Month-after-month across these years Dan organized truck convoys of wheat that would crawl up from the plains of Pakistan, through the Khyber Pass, then leaving the "good roads” wend along the most remote of tracks into the mountains of the Hazarajat. (Dan designed special truck wheel chains and had metalsmiths make them so the truck wheels could gain traction while crossing icy precipices.) And inevitably the wheat convoys would get stuck, sometimes for days in the snow. Dan stayed with the drivers digging not just the convoys out, but indeed digging forward through the drifts so the wheat could be delivered.
In a world of linear thinkers (get supplies to the people, keep accounting ledgers with tight paper trails, discuss the challenges of Afghanistan in logic and systematic points) Dan created a world of convoluted, self-contradicting complexity. Make it simple, Dan, was the aid-donor's frustrated demand.
No was the Dan reply—simple is not Afghanistan and certainly not the way that all the pieces fit together. The donor must adapt to Afghanistan—it is both wrong and ineffective to try and adapt Afghanistan to Western ways. Dan Terry was right; something he illustrated every time he got a convoy of trucks through into the distant Hazarajat.
More remarkable than that his trucks got through was that along each route people waited in the snows—not khans waiting who would take the wheat and profit but local people pre-organized into work groups to build roads and irrigations systems. Dan had called the local systems into functioning. While international assistance attempted to impose logical linear ways, Dan both figured out and also succeeded in working within the complex systems of reality in Afghanistan.
Then in 2002 the Taliban fell and supposedly a new world of prosperity was coming to Afghanistan. Some thought the Dan Terry ways of working within Afghan systems were unneeded, but still Dan and Seija stayed as they always had. Do not impose onto the people an external doctrine, help them grow from within with their own resources—doing so is true love for the other. Doing so is respect for the other's humanity, not emphasizing their deficiencies. A profound ethical choice needed to be underway in the international community, and Dan Terry was outspoken in trying to press it forward. Few understood Dan's point of respect and building from within Afghanistan, so certain were they of the rightness of their biases.
But the Afghan people were rejecting the external ways. Dan heard this, and history is increasingly confirming what he heard many years before others. Dan would not join the massive flood of foreign dollars. He did not believe in answers lying in Westerners. He believed in empowering Afghans by opening their understanding. New ideas needed to blend with old ways. In 2006 he had left his thirty-year base in the International Assistance Mission and joined Future Generations Afghanistan, serving from 2007-2008 as its Country Director.
Through the decade of post-Taliban rule, as the Taliban and insurgents mounted efforts to return, Dan kept listening, kept respecting, kept insisting that new ways be uncovered in old truths of the people. He was trying to work with the new government and within the changing culture. It was a very confusing, fast-moving time when the primary value of many was self-advancement, but when Dan's value was larger social advancement, especially in a manner that would engage the most marginalized.
The quest he was on was not only a challenge of discovering ways of better well-being, but more importantly it was also the challenge of acting on the truths of respect and compassion. It was to act in that way that Dan Terry went once again into the rugged valleys of Afghanistan, this time to Nuristan, this time to help people see more clearly. It was evidence of the sincerity of his beliefs that he died on the way back, sure that the way forward was in going ahead, sure that the way out of the muck of present deteriorating ways lay in working with the Afghan people not trying to manipulate them.
Let us turn to his own words: "With any conflict can only come more and more conflict or a real resolution to the problem. So, it is in the places of greatest conflict where there is hope for the greatest resolution.” –Dan Terry
--By Dan'l Taylor
Corrections and additions are appreciated.
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